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Last weekend, I asked two British foreign-policy officials what had been the most troubling moment, so far, of President Donald Trump’s world-destabilizing start to 2026. Both said (despite the British government’s refusal to acknowledge this out loud) that it was the United States’ seizure of the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, from Caracas, in the early hours of January 3rd. Trump “surprised us on the downside,” one said. “Just not having had an inkling that Venezuela was coming,” the other observed.

The suddenness—and the likely illegality—of the U.S. operation was disquieting because the British government has spent the past year contorting itself in order to stay in Trump’s good books, while professing belief in things like the U.N. Charter and what used to be called the rules-based order. In public, Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, has said only that he “sheds no tears” for Maduro, and that he also believes in international law. He will stand up to bullies, just not the one in the Oval Office. What would be the point, anyway? “With this Administration, you would essentially be burning your bridges. You would be destroying your access,” one of the officials I talked to said. “You might even start to knock away at some of the foundations, in terms of the military coöperation, the intelligence coöperation.” The other official just sounded wearier. “All of this is really, really hard,” he told me.

Until now, getting along with Trump has been counted as a rare policy success for Starmer, during his beleaguered eighteen months in office. Starting in 2024, both Labour Party officials and British diplomats courted the Trump campaign, adopting a posture of studied deference. “Whatever has been said about Donald Trump, white, Black, and brown working-class Americans voted for him in high numbers. And that’s something to be reckoned with by my liberal Democrat friends,” David Lammy, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, said, when I interviewed him for a piece in the magazine, this time last year. (Last September, Lammy became the Deputy Prime Minister; his role in the Foreign Ministry was taken by Yvette Cooper, the former Home Secretary.) In the fall, Trump enjoyed a second state visit to the U.K., during which he and Melania Trump dined with King Charles and watched a parachute display from the steps of Chequers, the Prime Minister’s Buckinghamshire country retreat. In return for its obeisance, Britain has escaped most of the Trump Administration’s wrath toward Europe, and the European Union, in particular. The country has dodged most of the tariffs imposed on the rest of the continent and signed a notional thirty-one-billion-pound “tech prosperity deal,” to encourage A.I. investment at home and in the U.S. We try not to talk about civilizational erasure.

The prize has been to keep Trump onside when it comes to Ukraine. The day after Maduro was indicted in New York and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told CNN that Greenland should “obviously” be part of the U.S., Starmer was in Paris, with Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky, agreeing to deploy British and French troops to Ukraine, in the event of a ceasefire. Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, were there to endorse the idea, speaking of “durable security guarantees” and “real backstops,” backed up by the U.S., to stop Russian aggression. Diplomatically, at least, it all feels a long way from Zelensky’s dressing-down in the White House, eleven months ago. “That’s an enormous achievement,” one of the British officials said. The day after the meeting in Paris, British forces supported the U.S. military when it intercepted the Bella 1, a Russian-flagged oil tanker, in the North Atlantic, and Starmer and Trump caught up on the phone. “The Prime Minister has spoken to Trump several times,” the other official said. “And they have, you know, proper conversations about things. So I feel like we are still in a position to influence and we still have a partner that wants to help.”

It is impossible to overstate how much of Britain’s foreign—and security—policy is predicated on containing Vladimir Putin. In 2025, the U.K. signed a hundred-year partnership agreement with Ukraine. “It looks absolutely mad,” Richard Whitman, a professor of international relations at the University of Kent, told me. “Who would sign a treaty of that duration?” If British soldiers are eventually sent to Ukraine, it would mark a major departure for the defense of the continent. For the first time since the Second World War, the U.S. would be reduced to the role of peace guarantor, rather than being physically responsible for policing Europe’s borders. “This is a new version of the British Army of the Rhine,” one of the officials said, referring to the force, composed of thousands of British soldiers, that was stationed in Germany from the nineteen-forties to the eighties. “It’s a new European security architecture that is coming out of this, with Ukraine integrated into the West, and into NATO, in all but name.”

The fear is that Trump’s support could vanish at any moment. “He has dismissed international law and the interests of old allies,” Bronwen Maddox, the director of Chatham House, Britain’s most important foreign-policy think tank, said, in a speech in London on Tuesday evening. “It is not grandiose to call this the end of the Western alliance.” I asked Maddox what had been the most worrying moment of 2026, for her, and she said that it had been the President’s “casual acquisitiveness” when it came to Greenland. “That’s not making light of what it’s like to be in Iran or northwest Nigeria or Venezuela under U.S. missiles,” Maddox said. “It’s the words about Greenland. And the Danes and others saying, ‘Look, you can have mineral exploration. You can have more bases. What do you want?’ ” She continued, “It is the lawlessness of the acquisitive instinct in the Administration and the unpredictability.” Maddox spelled out the growing list of U.S. actions that are now problematic for the U.K.: Trump’s five-billion-dollar lawsuit against the BBC; ongoing disputes about tech regulation (a recent U.S. visa ban for European Commission officials; Elon Musk’s constant goading of the Starmer government) and trade (last year’s tech-prosperity deal is currently on pause); and the verbal—so far, at least—attacks against NATO allies. “Those are absolutely fundamental incursions on U.K. interests,” Maddox said. “And I think the government may be forced to the point of having to say so.”

For three-quarters of a century, Britain’s role in the world was expressed, for the most part, through two interlocking relationships: with the E.U., across the English Channel, and with the U.S., across the Atlantic. “It was almost like the ocean you swam in, in British foreign policy, was that you tried to have the best of both worlds,” John Casson, who served as an adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron and then as Britain’s Ambassador to Egypt, told me. “You try and have as much economic success and security from Europe and as much economic success and security you can get from America at the same time.” For Britain, acting through reliable partners and international institutions wasn’t performative—it was power itself. “It had the effect of multiplying Britain’s power in the world, way beyond our real weight,” Casson said. “It prolonged the British moment, if you like, longer than we deserved.”

Within a decade, the U.K. has lost its position in the E.U.—through self-harm, in the form of Brexit—and is now confronting the reality of an American partner that it can no longer rely on or predict. “I think we’ve all hoped that Trump would be superficial and would pass. But this is making me realize that, even if he is superficial and none of this stuff has lasting success, it will still damage some fundamentals of how the U.K. has made its way in the world for two or three generations,” Casson said. Maddox made a similar point in her speech. “The world should assume that much of what Trump has done will stick,” she said. “It will not snap back, because it is what many Americans want, or because trust is gone.”

This is, more than anything else, a learning moment. “I’ve probably seen more people cite Thucydides in the last month than I have in the last, I don’t know, twenty to thirty years,” Whitman, the professor of international relations, said. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The question for Britain—and other historic allies of the U.S.—is to what extent they acquiesce to the Stephen Miller reading of the world, or if, indeed, they have a choice. “We can’t quite give up on the world that we thought we had created,” Whitman said. “Are we holding on for the U.S. to sort of rejoin it? Or are we going to make a move to try and build something with other like-minded states?” In the short term, the hardest—and, by far, the saddest—part is accepting how much has changed, for Britain and the U.S. as individual nations and as a duo. To see the exceptional bending to the iron laws of the world. From the British perspective, Casson drew a parallel between dealing with Trump’s America and Xi Jinping’s China. Disengagement is not an option when it comes to a superpower. But seeking leverage (where possible) and being afraid (where appropriate) isn’t a bad place to start. “We must get ready to treat America like a foreign country, properly, and be really honest with ourselves about: Where are they dangerous? Where can we work with them? What can we offer them?” Casson said. “Just do what we do with other big countries.” ♦

Unlike the killing of Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, on January 7th, we have no footage of the moment a federal agent opened fire on a man and woman driving a truck in Portland, Oregon, a day later. All we have is the Department of Homeland Security’s version of events. That, at around 2:20 P.M., Border Patrol agents approached a man and a woman in the parking lot of a hospital. That the man, who was driving the truck, attempted to run the agents over, causing one of the agents on the scene to discharge his weapon in self-defense.

“We know what the federal government says happened here,” Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said at a press conference, hours later. “There was a time when we could take them at their word. That time is long past.” Wilson seemed to be referencing not just obviously false statements that had been made by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, and President Donald Trump in the immediate aftermath of the Minneapolis shooting—that the agent who shot Good had been run over and nearly died—he also appeared to be alluding to his own city’s ongoing conflict with the White House.

Portland has been a major target of the President’s assault on sanctuary cities during his second term, and after a tumultuous past few months, which involved a plan to send federalized National Guard troops into the Oregon city, Trump recently decided to take a victory lap. Earlier this month, while flying on Air Force One, he told reporters, “Portland, we got it down to almost no crime.”

Forget that what the President described as an “on fire” and “war ravaged” hellscape never existed—I spent four days there in October and found the city decidedly unburnt—no National Guardsman ever actually patrolled a Portland street. Only nine National Guard members eventually entered the city, but they were stationed for just a few hours inside an ICE facility before a court order had them removed.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that National Guard troops must exit Chicago, and remain out of other cities, including Portland, Trump’s boast on Air Force One also functioned as a rare acknowledgment of defeat, a concession that the judicial branch had blocked his takeover of municipalities deemed insufficiently supportive of his agenda.

Since the departure of National Guardsmen from the state, there has been an uneasy quiet in Portland. There were still protests outside the ICE facility, but they were much calmer compared with the massive demonstrations last summer and through the fall. Then, last week, as the country was still processing Good’s death in Minneapolis, that violent D.H.S. confrontation on the streets of Portland seized the city’s attention.

On January 8th, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, conducting what D.H.S. described as a targeted vehicle stop, encountered two Venezuelan nationals in a hospital parking lot, in Hazelwood, a neighborhood in East Portland. D.H.S. says that the agents approached a red Toyota Tacoma, occupied by Luis David Nino-Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras. A witness said he saw one officer approach the vehicle and pound on the driver’s-side window, causing the truck to back up twice into a vehicle behind it, then race away. A Border Patrol agent fired about five shots, shooting both Nino-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras. Nino-Moncada, the driver, sped for more than two miles and screeched into an apartment-complex lot, blaring the truck horn wildly, with a bullet wound on his arm. (Nino-Moncada denies using the vehicle as a weapon.) He called 911, pleading for help, and said that he and Zambrano-Contreras had run away from ICE. Zambrano-Contreras bled from her chest. Responding to the 911 call, Portland police found the pair and summoned emergency medical personnel.

Word in Hazelwood spread quickly. When Andrea Valderrama, who represents Outer East Portland in the Oregon State Legislature and lives in the neighborhood, saw her elementary-school-aged daughter an hour later, she was horrified to learn that her child was already aware of an incident. “It was not the standard, ‘How was your day at school?’ conversation,” Valderrama told me. “It was an indication, as a mom, of the impact these ICE enforcement actions are having on our kiddos.”

The district Valderrama represents is forty-eight per cent nonwhite, and seventeen per cent identify as Hispanic, including Valderrama, whose parents are Peruvian. “East Portland has a significant number of immigrants, refugees, and families of color,” she said, “more so than other parts of the city.” The community had been besieged by D.H.S. raids since Trump retook office. Valderrama described “ICE agents breaking down doors” and “causing property damage, drawing guns regularly.” This has affected the disposition of the neighborhood. “There has been increased fear and concern because there’s been an increased use of excessive force and violence and traumatic separation of families,” she told me.

Now, just a day after the fatal shooting of Good, in Minneapolis, two people had been shot down the street from Valderrama’s home. That night, she joined Mayor Wilson and other community leaders to address the public. “My family came to this country fleeing really the same type of violent tactics that we’re seeing in my neighborhood and in this city and across this country,” Valderrama said from the podium. The mayor, after questioning D.H.S’s version of events, had a message for the Feds. “We are calling on ICE to halt all operations in Portland,” he said, “until a full and independent investigation can take place.”

Nearly all the questions at the press conference were for Bob Day, Portland’s chief of police. A ginger-haired former aspiring pastor, Day seemed visibly troubled by the shooting. Did he expect the Feds to involve his department in the investigation? “I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “Frankly, there’s a lot of competing interests, as we know.” Just before the briefing, D.H.S. alleged the two shooting victims had ties to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan transnational organization accused of crimes including kidnapping, human trafficking, and contract killings. Is the gang active in Portland? “I don’t have any information that would link that at this time,” Day said. He didn’t even know the victims’ names yet.

Throughout the night and into the next morning, the story ran through the maw of cable news and social media, following the same patterns as the story of Good’s killing earlier in the week. Observers were either on the side of the shooting victims, who were recovering in the hospital, or on the side of the federal agents, who had reportedly been assaulted with a vehicle. Except in this case, with no video footage, the online and talk-show combatants had less to draw from.

On Friday, just before 8 A.M. local time, D.H.S. announced new details on X, writing that Nino-Moncada “is a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela and suspected Tren de Aragua gang member” and was “arrested for D.U.I. and unauthorized use of a vehicle.” The post also accused Zambrano-Contreras of playing “an active role in a Tren de Aragua prostitution ring” and being “involved with a prior shooting in Portland.”

Hours later, Day held another press conference. Standing at the same podium, he was even more solemn than before. He recapped the events of the prior night, when hundreds of people outside City Hall and outside the ICE facility protested the shootings in Portland and Minneapolis. Six people had been arrested for disorderly conduct. And he announced that, after doing some digging into the department’s backlog of cases, there was “a nexus” between the shooting victims and Tren de Aragua. A shooting in the area, in July, 2025, had ties to one of the victims, he said. But he couldn’t say which victim, Nino-Moncada or Zambrano-Contreras, was connected to the prior shooting, or what exactly those ties were, although he noted that they were not identified as suspects. He could only say that, in the aftermath of the July shooting, a victim in that incident had told police that Tren de Aragua was involved. (An attorney for Nino-Moncada characterized accusations of his connection to Tren de Aragua as “without evidence,” while an attorney for Zambrano-Contreras said that the federal government “has a well-documented history of making false and inflammatory statements about immigrants, Venezuelans in particular.”) Day also said that Zambrano-Contreras had once been arrested for prostitution. (It was unclear if she was charged with a crime, or if Nino-Moncada was charged after his D.U.I. arrest. But earlier this week, Nino-Moncada was charged with aggravated assault of a federal officer, in connection with the Border Patrol shooting. He pleaded not guilty.)

Then Day broke down. “I want to speak for just a moment, specifically to my Latino community,” he said, choking on his words. “It saddens me that we even have to qualify these remarks, because I understand—or at least have attempted to understand—through your voices, your concern, your fear, your anger.” He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “This information in no way is meant to disparage or to condone or support or agree with any of the actions that occurred yesterday.”

Right-wing media leapt at the moment. “Portland police chief cries while admitting DHS was right about Tren de Aragua ties in CBP shooting,” read a Fox News headline. Online commenters were predictably brutal. “Did someone steal his purse before he got up there?” read one. “Embarrassing. Spineless simp,” read another.

The ridicule seemed to transcend the chief and apply to Portland as a whole: this odd city, in the upper left of the country, that coddles its undocumented immigrants to such a degree that, even when those immigrants are identified as having criminal records, its leaders still embrace them and shed tears for their pain.

I had spoken with Day in October, as he was trying to protect the public’s right to peacefully protest the huge presence of federal officers at the local ICE facility amid the threat of occupation by the National Guard. From the conversation we had back then, I could see that Day is a man who approaches the role of police chief with introspection, but may have a blind spot for just how much social media now warps everything it touches.

“I’ve learned over the past seventy-two hours that, in the world of social media, male police officers aren’t supposed to cry,” Day joked to me, a few days after his press conference. He told me he was proud of the people of his city for exercising their First Amendment rights robustly and, most of the time, peacefully. And he was proud of his department. He pointed out that it was, in part, because of the testimony of three Portland police officers—who made the case that federal intervention was unnecessary for public safety—that a judge had ultimately blocked the National Guard from deploying to the city.

“The system worked as it’s designed to work,” Day told me, with a sense of finality—blind again, perhaps, to the machinations underway on social media to characterize his city as crime-ridden. Recently, on Truth Social, Trump, responding to the removal of the National Guard troops in American cities like Portland, made a promise. “We will come back,” he wrote. ♦

Can it be that I first saw Anne Gridley in the extraordinary Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s work more than fifteen years ago? It seems not possible, given how much I remember her as Juliet in the company’s brilliant “Romeo and Juliet,” against the wonderful Robert M. Johanson’s Romeo. But it’s true. Gridley’s performance was a standout in 2009, and it remains so in my mind. As conceived by Pavol Liška and Kelly Copper, the co-founders and co-directors behind this brilliant company, the adaptation, developed from conversations with friends, family, and company members, told the story based on what was remembered of the play, and how what was remembered was spoken—‘So this guy likes a girl named Juliet, and she gets upset’—that kind of thing. I remember laughing so hard, largely because of how Gridley, so relaxed in her comedy, played Juliet as someone who made sense to herself, if no one else, and what did she care? Gridley’s comedic stance—part purveyor of nonsense, part paragon of common sense—put her squarely in the tradition of amazing women like Imogene Coca, and “Mad TV” ’s Debra Wilson, comedians who made mental pratfalls a thing. Later, in 2013, I saw the company’s epic multi-part work “Life and Times,” and I fell in love with Gridley all over again. She didn’t need to concede ground to any other performer, let alone the immensity of Liška and Copper’s vision: she took whatever brilliance was thrown her way and made it her own.

Illustration by Celia Jacobs

Now Gridley appears in a piece she’s written, “Watch Me Walk” (presented by Soho Rep, at Playwrights Horizons, through Feb. 8). It’s a show about her hereditary spastic paraplegia, a condition she shares with her grandmother and her mother. Directed by the talented Eric Ting, “Watch Me Walk” is about many things, including what happens to the performer’s primary asset, her body, when it is no longer the body that wanted to perform in the first place. Is she just a living memory? Another statistic in our mess of a health-care system, if you could call it “care”? Despite it all or because of it, Gridley’s script, and the incredible performer who means to tell us her story without sentiment, remains a prime example of what we get when autobiographical theatre works: intelligence, and the ability to laugh at oneself, with one’s heart, as always, in both the wrong and the right place.—Hilton Als

In recent years, the London d.j. and multi-instrumentalist Fred again.. has quickly become one of the most buzzed-about stars in electronic music. The youngest artist to win Producer of the Year at the Brit Awards, he has steadily evolved from Boiler Room darling and producer for such artists as Ed Sheeran, BTS, Ellie Goulding, and Stormzy to solo artist in his own right. His long-running “USB” compilation, an ever-growing album of tracks he’s been adding to since 2022, feels like a microcosm of this growth: collaborations with cult electronic figures and touted rappers build out an arc of the rare M.P.C. wizard so charismatic he can’t be relegated to behind the boards.—Sheldon Pearce (East End Studios; Jan. 16-31.)

In Erica Schmidt’s “The Disappear,” a Noël Cowardly farce about a Hollywood power couple on the fritz, an art-monster film director, his fed-up novelist wife, and two seductive actors spar, flirt, and struggle to make a movie. Hamish Linklater is nastily funny as the doofus auteur Ben, all horndog self-pity and air-dancer slapstick; Miriam Silverman, as his wife, Mira, is so likable that the audience loudly rooted for her to kiss a movie star (Kelvin Harrison, Jr., a sly standout). Both the marriage and the play fall apart in Act II, but, along the way, the cast scores laughs with rude zingers about two-artist pairings, a topic that Schmidt, who is married to the actor Peter Dinklage, likely knows well. “What’s a better achievement than a long, mutually rewarding marriage?” Mira begs. “Everything! Literally anything else!” Ben groans.—Emily Nussbaum (Minetta Lane Theatre; through Feb. 22.)

New York City Ballet performs Jerome Robbins’s “Antique Epigraphs.”

Photograph by Erin Baiano

New York City Ballet’s especially packed season includes two intriguing premières. In “The Wind-Up,” Justin Peck takes on the first movement of Beethoven’s grandiose and propulsive “Eroica” Symphony, which the composer originally dedicated to Napoleon—a suitably “heroic” figure. Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Naked King,” a revival of a 1936 story ballet based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” is a rarity, originally choreographed by the Ukrainian-born Serge Lifar to music by the neoclassicist Jean Françaix. Lifar’s choreography has been lost, so all the choreography is new. Among the interesting revivals are Jerome Robbins’s “Antique Epigraphs,” a work for eight women, inspired by Roman statues of dancers found at Herculaneum, and the courtly “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” by George Balanchine, a ballet with no soloists, only ensemble dancing.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; Jan. 20-March 1.)

The exhibition “And That’s True Too” explores the life and work of the Viennese-born writer Lore Segal, whose autobiographically inflected fiction appeared often in The New Yorker from 1961 until 2024, when her final piece, “Stories About Us,” ran shortly before her death. In 1938, at the age of ten, Segal escaped Austria on a Kindertransport, and she spent the Second World War in Britain before moving to the Dominican Republic and then to the United States. The show, curated by Karin Hanta for the Leo Baeck Institute, including photographs, manuscripts, and archival materials, illuminates the way that this forced exile underpinned much of Segal’s writing. At an opening event, on Jan. 22, the actress Toni Kalem reads from Segal’s 1964 novel, “Other People’s Houses.”—Cressida Leyshon (Center for Jewish History; through April 15.)

Jodie Foster in “A Private Life.”

Photograph by Jérôme Prébois / Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

Jodie Foster’s starring role in “A Private Life,” directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, makes the movie an automatic event. Foster, acting mainly in French, plays Lilian Steiner, a chilly and disciplined Paris-based psychotherapist whose life and practice are thrown into disorder when a patient, Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), dies by suicide. Lilian suspects foul play and, recklessly investigating Paula’s widower (Mathieu Amalric) and her daughter (Luàna Bajrami), seeks the help of her own ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil). Their wry scenes together, which have the warmth of a rekindled flame, are the movie’s raison d’être. Foster gives a taut performance despite the unstrung absurdities of the plot. The story is anchored in Paris’s Jewish community, but the context remains anecdotal and unexplored.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)

Dudley Randall’s poem “A Poet Is Not a Jukebox,” written in the late twentieth century, underscores that a Black artist should create based on how they feel, not by abiding by the expectations of others. Indeed, the poet is not a jukebox, but the poet, in his lush lyricism, does inspire music. For “American Mavericks project VI. 1: Quest,” Randall’s grand-niece, the musician Chelsea Randall, premières six piano compositions—by Carolyn Yarnell, Jeremiah Evans, and others—all based on poems by such Black Arts Movement writers as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Randall himself. The paired poems will be read aloud by Randall’s nephew Jon Randall, and the current poet laureate of Michigan, Melba Joyce Boyd. Let us embark.—Jane Bua (Brooklyn Public Library; Jan. 25.)

Illustration by Riikka Laakso

It is a strange irony whenever digital culture gives rise to a boom in tangible objects, but such is the case when it comes to planners—or, as the more ancient among us might call them, datebooks—which have exploded in popularity in recent years, due primarily to an extreme online fervor around the theories and practices of maintaining a handwritten agenda. A casual survey of the TikTok hashtag #plannertok reveals thousands of videos by organizational influencers, all offering up their own tips and tricks for how to keep a tidy Filofax. The “bullet journaling” trend, with its aesthetic intensity and singular devotion to dot-grid notebooks, shows no sign of abating, even after a decade of popularity. But there are also newer, much-hyped methods of cataloguing one’s life on paper. The clear current front-runner is the Japanese company Hobonichi, whose coveted Techo planners have spawned a bustling Reddit forum that gets upward of seventy thousand visitors per week, many of whom are eager to share pictures of their weekly planning “spreads.” Also surging are products from the American stationer Traveler’s Company, whose leather-bound notebooks with thin elastic straps are endlessly customizable—you can mix and match dozens of inserts, including watercolor paper and a card file. For those who need a bit more guidance, Laurel Denise planners each come with one of eight dedicated systems that help train the user in the skills of “time blocking” and “goal setting.” The company’s website features a quiz that helps to determine one’s ideal planning style, and it feels virtuous to take it, even if you never end up writing down a single appointment. Sometimes just the idea of a planner—that one little book could solve all your executive-function issues—can be more intoxicating than the thing itself.

This week, I’m stuck on: “Getting Lost,” by Annie Ernaux, which is a diary that the author kept of an affair she had, in the late eighties, with a married Russian apparatchik she calls “S.” At first, the book struck me as frustrating and repetitive: she longs to hear from S., she’s maddened by suspicions that he’s lost interest, he calls, she’s overjoyed, then back to obsession and anguish. For a guy who has approximately three modes—“he fucks, he drinks vodka, he talks about Stalin”—two hundred pages of yearning felt like a lot. But, by the end, I found myself swept up—stuck—in the cycle, disarmed by Ernaux’s total commitment to honesty about her inner life.

This week, I cringed at: practically every quote in this mordant Amanda Hess joint about the Silicon Valley philosophes who want to gamify love. Phrases such as “general mate value factor,” and “If the woman is about half a standard deviation more agreeable than the man, that’s the optimal point for relationship durability.” Yuck!

This week, I loved: realizing that I actually do respond to visual art. For a long time, I’ve held onto a private narrative about not really “getting” it. (I have several painters in my family; do with that information what you will.) But I recently went to the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, which was—news that will astonish no one—extraordinary. A favorite sighting was Clyfford Still’s painting “Jamais,” which has been said to depict the goddess Demeter mourning her daughter Persephone but also reflects Still’s horror at the landscapes of his Dust Bowl childhood. I’m still haunted by his matte-red sun, dark and sullen, squatting in the bottom left corner of the canvas like a toad.

Alfred Walker and Brittany Renee in the Met Opera’s “Porgy and Bess.”

Photograph by Richard Termine / Met Opera

This week, I’m looking forward to: “Porgy and Bess” at the Met! I remember watching scenes from the 1959 film for sixth-grade music class, and I’m sure I’ve heard the song “Summertime” performed a zillion times, but I’ve never experienced the show live. (Also, did you see that the Washington National Opera is severing ties with the Kennedy Center? Good for them!)

This week, I’m consuming: This question reminds me that I’ve long wanted to read a Grub Street Diet written from the perspective of the Very Hungry Caterpillar, where the titular character is trying to prove that he has a lot of cool friends who meet him at offbeat restaurants and that readers should buy his forthcoming novel. Anyway, in Venice, I ate a tartufo.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Connor Storrie being cute
• Birds on the radio
• The Central Park coyotes, Romeo and Juliet

In the past week, Donald Trump has threatened war with the ayatollahs in Iran, with the U.S.’s NATO allies in Denmark, and with Americans protesting his policies in the state of Minnesota. Of these, the target he seems the most serious about is the last one.

On Tuesday, in a statement whose full import you might have missed amid all the other Trump-generated crises, the President warned Minnesota: “THE DAY OF RETRIBUTION & RECKONING IS COMING!” Yes, our revenge-obsessed leader seems to have put an entire state in his crosshairs. By Thursday morning, as protests continued to escalate in reaction to the increasingly violent presence of armed federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump issued an ultimatum: either the “professional agitators and insurrectionists” stand down from “attacking the Patriots of I.C.E.,” or he would finally follow through and invoke the Insurrection Act to send in the U.S. military.

Deploying active-duty soldiers to put down a domestic disturbance has been one of Trump’s long-running preoccupations: he’s got this big, bad military—why can’t he use it to show blue America who’s boss? In the summer of 2020, as largely nonviolent Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country, it was only the combined objections of Trump’s Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs that stopped him from doing so. But Trump has continued to crave militarized displays of force against fellow-Americans. During his second term, he’s repeatedly mobilized the National Guard over the objections of local elected officials, on the thinnest of pretexts, whether it’s protests against his heavy-handed immigration forces in Los Angeles or a nonexistent crime emergency in the District of Columbia. “It’s a war from within,” Trump told a gathering of generals last fall, explaining that they should, from now on, view U.S. cities as “training grounds.”

The goal all along, it appears, was something like what’s happening today in Minnesota: a street-theatre carnival of violence, mostly instigated by the federal government itself, in an effort to create a genuine security crisis that Trump can then step in to resolve. And so we have begun 2026 bombarded with upsetting, awful images—of a masked man dressed in army green shooting a mom in a maroon Honda S.U.V. as agents screamed conflicting instructions at her, of Americans walking down the icy streets of their own city being stopped and interrogated about their citizenship for no reason except the color of their skin. How does one not shudder at the video of the woman who was dragged out of her car the other day, as she screamed that she was a disabled U.S. citizen on the way to an appointment with her doctor? Trump has sent more federal agents to Minneapolis—several thousand of them—than there are police officers in the city. It’s a fight he wants, and it’s a fight he’s got.

Notably, the fight is now about much more than immigration enforcement. Trump has escalated, as he invariably does. On the campaign trail, he told supporters that they were voting for “mass deportations now” to get rid of evil criminal aliens who did not belong in America. How quickly he’s gone from that to cheering as the federal government harasses people with “citizenship checks,” blockades neighborhood streets, responds to the taunts of teen-agers with beatings, and tear-gasses reporters while they are broadcasting live from the disruption.

The President and his advisers have called those opposing them in Minnesota radical lunatics, domestic terrorists, and outright insurrectionists. Do they expect us to have already forgotten that, on Trump’s first day back in the White House, he pardoned more than a thousand actual insurrectionists who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf, in a vain effort to block his 2020 electoral defeat? On Tuesday, barely an hour after urging demonstrators in Tehran to “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!,” Trump issued a call for retribution against the “anarchists and professional agitators” protesting him in Minnesota. By Wednesday, he’d walked back his pledge of assistance to the protesters in Iran. “Help is on its way,” he’d said. But it wasn’t. The violent confrontation that Trump craves most is the war at home, against the enemy within.

It’s not his only goal, though. Trump himself has told us another: “RETRIBUTION.” I know it doesn’t make any sense; it’s hard to see why the President would bear a grudge against an entire state. But grievances drive Trump, and he has one against Minnesota. “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times,” he said last week. “I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state—a corrupt voting state.” The fact that these claims are ridiculous—Trump never even won as much as a full forty-seven per cent of the vote there, in any of the three Presidential elections in which he ran—does not make this any less of a grave threat. Is the President capable of exacting revenge over a lie? Of course he is.

Late last year, Reuters documented at least four hundred and seventy targets of retribution whom Trump has singled out since returning to office. Nearly a hundred prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have been fired or forced out for working on cases against Trump or his allies, or because they were alleged to be too woke. Roughly fifty people, businesses, or other entities have been threatened with investigations or penalties for opposing Trump. The White House itself has directly issued at least thirty-six orders, decrees, and directives targeting at least a hundred specific individuals and entities with punitive actions. More than a hundred security clearances have been revoked from those on his enemies list. And all that was only by the end of November.

A year ago, there were still those who believed—or at least hoped—that Trump’s explicitly stated vow of a second-term Presidency focussed on revenge and retribution was just more bluster. How wrong they were.

In a speech on Wednesday night, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, argued that what is happening in his state right now is “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.” The state has sued to stop it, but a federal judge has not yet granted an injunction, and legal experts are skeptical that the case will succeed. In the meantime, Walz described a situation that is both dystopian and almost without modern precedent:

Armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door, ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live. They’re pulling over people indiscriminately, including U.S. citizens, and demanding to see their papers. And at grocery stores, at bus stops, even at schools, they’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans, kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process.

Listening to this tragic accounting, I found it hard not to think of all the dark fantasies about America that Trump has trafficked in over the years. Next Tuesday will mark one year since he returned to office. Trump may have started out by trash-talking America; now he is simply trashing it. Minnesota is his legacy. It is American carnage made real. ♦

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In 2019, it seemed possible that the next big country star would be a Navy aviation ordnanceman from Oklahoma named Zach Bryan, who recorded scruffy videos of himself hollering fervent lyrics about nights that lasted forever and relationships that didn’t. “I put as much thought as I could into, like, writing the songs,” he told the country critic Grady Smith, in a YouTube interview that summer. “And no thought into how I was going to put it out there.” Listeners found him anyway—helped, no doubt, by social-media algorithms that can spot a new viral hit long before human gatekeepers catch on. “Heading South,” one of Bryan’s first songs to draw a large audience, had a refrain that served as a declaration of regional pride. “Don’t stop headin’, headin’ south / ’Cause they will understand the words that are pouring from your mouth,” he sang, sounding like a young man who had finally found his place in the world. The polemical music site Saving Country Music suggested that Bryan could stand to “refine his guitar playing and delivery,” but it also made a prediction: “Zach Bryan will have a strong career in country music if he so chooses.”

The prediction turned out to be about halfway accurate. In the past six years, Bryan, now twenty-nine, has built not merely a strong career but a singular one, and he has done it without much changing his no-frills approach. He ranked No. 8 on Spotify’s 2025 list of the most popular musicians in America, and in September he drew more than a hundred and twelve thousand fans to a concert at the University of Michigan football stadium; according to the industry site Pollstar, it was the biggest concert in U.S. history, excluding festivals and free shows. And yet Bryan wears his “country” identity lightly, when he wears it at all. He has generally ignored country radio, and been ignored by it in turn. Neither his voice nor his arrangements are particularly twangy, and the bars he sings about tend to be not honky-tonks but, rather, places like McGlinchey’s, a Philadelphia dive that he mentioned in an appealingly ragged tune called “28.” That song appeared on Bryan’s 2024 album, “The Great American Bar Scene,” which included, in a sign of his growing stature and not-quite-country identity, a pair of high-profile guests: John Mayer and Bruce Springsteen.

Since Bryan’s début, words haven’t stopped pouring from his mouth. His songs are propelled by idiomatic lyrics that sound as if they have been set to music only begrudgingly; many of his albums begin with a poem, as if to confirm that he has more verses than melodies to put them to. Last year, for the first time since 2021, there was no new Zach Bryan album, though fans still got a half-dozen new songs, along with a series of updates about his life. He carried on a public dispute with his ex-girlfriend Brianna LaPaglia, a podcaster, who had previously accused him of “narcissistic emotional abuse”; in the summer, footage emerged of him scaling a barbed-wire-topped fence in an apparent attempt to fight the country singer Gavin Adcock, who had accused him of phoniness; about two months after the incident, he announced, on Instagram, that he hadn’t had a drink in nearly two months, and suggested that he had been using alcohol to cope with “earth-shattering panic attacks”; on New Year’s Eve, in Spain, he got married, for the second time, and shared a video of himself singing Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” at the reception.

The marriage may have pleased Zach Bryan fans who want him to chill out and settle down, but his new album, which he released earlier this month, is more likely to please the other ones, who may well constitute the majority. It is called “With Heaven on Top,” and it is a shaggy record composed of twenty-four songs (and one poem) about chasing peace of mind around the world. There are no high-profile guests, unless you count the horn players who arrive at the beginning of the third track, “Appetite,” serving not to add polish but to subtract it. Much of the playing on the album is cheerfully imprecise; Bryan has said it was recorded in a handful of houses in Oklahoma, but the recordings, which include sing-alongs and stray noises, evoke the blurry conviviality of a bar band at the moment between last call and lights on. “Slicked Back,” about romantic bliss, seems to have been written under the influence of Tom Petty—when Bryan sings, “You’re so cool,” he could almost be Petty, drawling, “Yer so bad.” And on “River and Creeks,” a frisky ballad about fickle lovers, he tries out both a yipping falsetto and an Elvis-ish baritone.

Unlike many country-inspired singer-songwriters, though, Bryan doesn’t seem intent on re-creating an earlier musical era. His music, with its simple strumming and its unmediated lyrics, is generally too plain to be retro. Some of the early reactions to the album concerned not the music but the lyrics. “Bad News,” which Bryan previewed in October, features a reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE is gonna come bust down your door”); this alarmed some of his fans and excited others. But the song turns out to be less a protest than a nonpartisan lament: “Got some bad news / Fading of our red, white, and blue.” And “Skin,” a breakup song about an ex-lover with tattoos, has been widely interpreted as a new chapter in his ongoing exchange with LaPaglia, who has plenty of tattoos, and who has said that Bryan got a tattoo of her early in their relationship. “I’m taking a blade to my own skin,” he sings, or, rather, sneers. “And I ain’t never touching yours again.”

Bryan’s startling success—no one knew an ornery troubadour could be this popular, in this era—has helped build an audience for a cohort of like-minded singer-songwriters: Sam Barber, from Missouri, specializes in desolate ballads; Waylon Wyatt, from Arkansas, sings country breakup songs with a quaver and a hint of a yodel. Last year, Bryan uploaded a video of himself singing and strumming with an emerging singer-songwriter named Joshua Slone. Slone has a much softer and more plaintive voice and, judging from his finely wrought songs, a tendency to contend with heartbreak not by going out and raging but by staying in and ruminating. Especially compared with a singer like Slone, Bryan is an uncommonly stubborn performer: to enjoy his songs, you have to enjoy his halfway hoarse voice and his tendency to stray from the tune, not to mention his willingness to return time and again to familiar themes and familiar bars, like McGlinchey’s, which makes a return appearance on “With Heaven on Top.”

Bryan surely knows this, though he doesn’t always know what to do about it; one of the new songs, “Miles,” evokes the trudging repetition of the touring life a bit too faithfully, with Bryan repeating the titular word forty-two times. But “Plastic Cigarette,” an early fan favorite, is gentler and more effective, distilling a bygone love into a simple image: “I saw you on the river’s edge / Draggin’ on a plastic cigarette / With your swim top still wet.” After twenty-four tracks comes the title song: a benediction, sweetened with pedal steel, that is beautiful in a way much of Bryan’s music is defiantly not. This is the end of the album—but not, as it happens, the end of the story. Just as “With Heaven on Top” was being released, Bryan posted a note on Instagram that seemed surprisingly crotchety, coming from a guy with a new bride and a new record. “I’m assuming this record is just like all the other ones and there’s gonna be a billion people saying it’s over produced and shitty so I sat down in a room by myself and recorded all the songs acoustically so I didn’t have to hear everyone whine about more stuff,” he wrote. And so, a few days after the album arrived, he issued “With Heaven on Top (Acoustic),” which contains almost nothing but an acoustic guitar and Bryan’s voice, demonstrating how little adornment his best songs need. The acoustic version sounds nearly exactly like the old Zach Bryan, and it is hard to tell whether this means he is stuck or just sticking to what he does best. ♦